427: Original Recipe

We discover what we believe might be the original recipe for Coca-Cola…and share it with you! When this episode first aired in 2011, it made international headlines. This, and another story about telling copies from originals. Visit thisamericanlife.org/lifepartners https://thisamericanlife.supercast.com?utm_id=lifepartners&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=shownotes to sign up for our premium subscription. (00:00:00) Act One: The formula for Coca-Cola is one of the most jealously guarded trade secrets in the world. So we were surprised to find a 1979 newspaper article that might contain Coke's original recipe. We were even more surprised to find reasons to believe the recipe is real. (26 minutes) (00:26:23) Act Two: Jake Halpern tells this story about document expert John Reznikoff, who came into possession of some materials which — if authentic — would change history. Then, things got complicated (32 minutes) Transcripts are available at thisamericanlife.org https://www.thisamericanlife.org/427/transcript / This American Life privacy policy https://www.thisamericanlife.org/page/privacy-policy. / Learn more about sponsor message choices https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Ira Glass?

  Hey, it's Ira with a quick word before the show starts. So I have this video that I want to show you. Maybe you heard, because we did so many promos, actually, that we just did this live show onstage in Los Angeles where I told stories and then Vic McAlister and these really talented comedians did improvised scenes based on those stories on the spot. And we livestreamed video of this show. And I'm just here to say that if you missed the livestream, you can now see the show. We have posted the video online. It's a really fun show. And to watch this for absolutely free, sign up for a free trial This American Life Partners subscription. And our hope is, you know, you'll stick around after the trial and that you'll love all

• 0:42Ira Glass?

  the bonus episodes and listening ad-free and all the other stuff we give you. Plus, we hope you'll like helping us make the show by sending us this money. But if you don't, if you just want the free trial, watch the video, try it out for a couple of days, quit, no foul, fine with us, and I think you're really going to enjoy watching the show we did. Go to thisamericanlife.org/lifepartners and use the-- this is a very, very original promo code we came up with-- video. That's right. The promo code is video. That link is also in the show notes. OK, here's this week's show.

• 1:20Speaker 01

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• 1:50Ira Glass?

  Hey there, everybody. So I'm not going to beat around the bush. For this week's radio program, we think we may have found the original recipe for Coca-Cola. And I am not kidding. I am not kidding. One of the most famously guarded trade secrets on the planet. I have it right here. And I am going to read it to you. I'm going to read it to the world. And I'm going to make my case for why I think it's real, despite whatever Coca-Cola might say. And that is just one of the two stories on today's program. Today's show is something we first broadcast 15 years ago. And when we did, it made international headlines. I am not kidding about that. It broke news. But that is so long ago. I bet you've never heard this one, right?

• 2:31Ira Glass?

  From WBEZ Chicago, This American Life, I'm Ira Glass. Probably the best story about how protective Coca-Cola is of its secret formula comes in this book that was written by Charles Howard Kandler. His dad, Asa, did not invent Coca-Cola, but founded the Coca-Cola Company back in 1892. And Charles, the son, wrote this. "One of the proudest moments of my life came when my father initiated me into the mysteries of the secret flavoring formula, inducting me into the holy of holies." Charles then says, "Incredibly, there was no written formula, and the labels had been removed from all the containers of the ingredients. So they were, quote, 'identified only by sight, smell, and remembering where each was put on the shelf.

• 3:14Ira Glass?

  And I thereupon experienced the thrill of making up with his guidance a batch of merchandise 7X.'" Merchandise 7X. Merchandise 7X is the cartoonishly super-secret cloak-and-dagger name they give the flavoring mixture in Coca-Cola. Charles's dad, Asa, was so paranoid about anybody else getting hold of the secret formula for 7X that even though he was president of Coca-Cola-- he's president of the company-- he would go through the company mail himself and remove the invoices for any ingredients that had been purchased so that nobody in the accounting department could read what ingredients had been bought for the product. I learned all this from A History of Coca-Cola, a book written by investigative journalist and historian Mark Pendergrast.

• 3:56Speaker 02

  The company has always said, and as far as I know, it's true, that only two people at any given time know how to actually mix the 7X flavoring ingredient and that these people never travel on the same airplane in case it crashes. It's this carefully passed-on, you know, secret ritual and that the formula is kept in a bank vault at SunTrust, which used to be the Georgia Trust Company.

• 4:23Ira Glass?

  Of course, this makes no sense at all. Why can't the two guys fly on a plane if the formula is sitting inside a bank vault? Coke's official line on this these days is that they simply do not talk about how many people know the recipe. Though the reason that most of us think of it as one of the biggest trade secrets in the world is probably because that's the story Coca-Cola likes to tell.

• 4:43Speaker 03

  Coke's secret formula. Only two guys in the world know it. If something happened to one, the formula would be lost forever. And then, cookouts would be catastrophic.

• 4:56Ira Glass?

  In this particular Coke commercial, I guess the premise is that each of the two guys only knows half the formula. It's just one of several commercials that have come out recently that poke fun at the myth of the super-secret formula while at the same time bolstering and selling that myth. Coke even has this thrill ride at its museum in Atlanta, the World of Coca-Cola. We follow two characters who are trying to unlock the secret formula for Coca-Cola. And so, with all this money, all this energy, all these millions of dollars spent over the years to convince us of just how impossibly, importantly, iconically secret the formula to Coca-Cola is, it was a surprise when we stumbled across an article in Coke's hometown paper, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, February 18, 1979.

• 5:40Ira Glass?

  Not on the front page, but buried, buried back on page 2B. One of their columnists, Charles Salter, without any fanfare at all, published what looks like the original recipe for Coca-Cola. He found it in a pharmacist's old book of recipes. All the recipes, including the one for Coca-Cola, are written by hand. Most of them are for various ointments and remedies. And if that seems like a strange and random place to find this kind of thing, well, Coca-Cola was invented by a pharmacist and it was originally sold at pharmacy soda fountains. The article says that the book passed from one pharmacist to another until it fell into the hands of one Everett Beal, who owned a drugstore in Griffin, Georgia, 40 miles from Atlanta. And is mainly identified in the story as a fishing buddy of the columnist.

• 6:23Speaker 04

  Hello?

• 6:26Ira Glass?

  Judy?

• 6:27Speaker 04

  Yes, you're late.

• 6:28Ira Glass?

  I know I am.

• 6:30Speaker 04

  Did you have a nice flight back home?

• 6:33Ira Glass?

  Everett Beal passed away July 2010. I called his widow Judy at her home in Georgia so many times, asking for an interview, that at one point she said to me, "This is how you people won the war, isn't it?" You people, meaning northerners.

• 6:45Speaker 04

  And you wanted to know how Everett got this book?

• 6:50Ira Glass?

  Yes.

• 6:51Speaker 04

  Well, R.R. Evans was a good friend of Pemberton's.

• 6:54Ira Glass?

  OK, let's just pause the tape right there to explain who these guys are. The Pemberton that she's talking about is John Pemberton, the guy who invented Coca-Cola in Atlanta back in 1886. Like I said, he was a pharmacist, but he was also a maker of patent medicines. He made something called Globe Flower Cough Syrup. He made a blood purifier called Extract of Stilenga. R.R. Evans, that second person that she mentioned, Judy says, was another pharmacist in Atlanta at the time.

• 7:20Speaker 04

  And they were best friends and blah, blah, blah.

• 7:22Ira Glass?

  This book of recipes, Judy says, originally belonged to Evans. She says his name is all over the book.

• 7:28Speaker 04

  Right.

• 7:29Ira Glass?

  Apparently, after his friend Pemberton invented Coke, Evans copied down the formula in this book, calling it Coca-Cola.

• 7:35Speaker 04

  That's right.

• 7:36Ira Glass?

  And after Evans died, the book started its travels.

• 7:39Speaker 04

  Evans gave it to R.M. Mitchell from Griffin, Georgia.

• 7:45Ira Glass?

  Mm-hmm.

• 7:46Speaker 04

  And then Mitchell's widow was a friend of my husband's and told him, you know, after he passed away, to come over and get any books he wanted to out of the library. So Everett picked out the book.

• 7:59Ira Glass?

  What's it look like?

• 8:00Speaker 04

  Oh, gosh, it's 133 years old. It's just leather-bound.

• 8:04Ira Glass?

  Mm-hmm.

• 8:05Speaker 04

  And I wear gloves. The last time I looked at it, you know, I like to wear gloves.

• 8:10Ira Glass?

  Everett was so intrigued by the Coke recipe that he spent the last year of his life while he struggled with cancer, researching and writing his own book, A History of the Inventor of Coca-Cola That's Still Unpublished. Interestingly, just like the characters in Lord of the Rings, when they get a hold of the ring, once Everett had the secret formula, like the people at Coca-Cola, he started to get protective. The recipe book now sits in a bank vault. We'll take his reaction when his fishing buddy, Charles, did the 1979 newspaper story about the recipe book. The newspaper published a photo that was big enough that you can read all the ingredients and the amounts, the entire recipe.

• 8:43Speaker 04

  See, Charles did that, and Everett was unhappy about that.

• 8:48Ira Glass?

  Oh, he was?

• 8:49Speaker 04

  And I won't go into that, so.

• 8:50Ira Glass?

  Oh, really?

• 8:51Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 8:52Ira Glass?

  And was he happy that there was an article?

• 8:55Speaker 04

  Yeah, but not the formula page.

• 8:57Speaker 02

  Oh, here it is. Yeah. So I'm looking at it here.

• 9:02Ira Glass?

  We sent a copy of that photo, where you can see the recipe for Coca-Cola, to that historian of Coca-Cola, the guy who wrote that book, Mark Pendergrast. And my question for you is, could this be real?

• 9:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. I think that it certainly is a version of the formula. And it's very, very similar to the formula that I found, that I talked about and printed in the back of my book.

• 9:30Ira Glass?

  This was an amazing discovery. In Mark's book, he tells the story of looking through Coca-Cola's archives and being shown the yellowing pages of an old notebook that belonged to the inventor of Coca-Cola, John Pemberton. The Coke people told him that it was from way before Pemberton moved to Atlanta, way before he invented Coke.

• 9:46Speaker 02

  But in fact, it was quite clear that it was a formula book from at least after he'd invented Coca-Cola, because it mentioned Coca-Cola.

• 9:56Ira Glass?

  So do you think they just didn't know?

• 9:59Speaker 02

  Apparently not. So in this formula book, there was a piece of paper that had a big X on the top of it. And as I looked at it, I thought, you know, I saw this flavoring ingredient. It had neroli, it had coriander. I thought, my god, this is a Coca-Cola formula. I couldn't believe it.

• 10:18Ira Glass?

  And did the company confirm that that's what this was?

• 10:21Speaker 02

  Of course not. The company denies that that's what it was.

• 10:26Ira Glass?

  New York Times, May 3, 1993, the year Mark's book was published. Coca-Cola calls the recipe in his book, quote, "the latest in a long line of previous unsuccessful attempts to reveal a 107-year-old mystery." But here's where things get interesting. When you compare these two recipes, the one that Mark found in John Pemberton's own notebook, stored deep inside Coca-Cola's very own archives, and the one from the 1979 newspaper clipping, found 40 miles away in Griffin, Georgia--

• 10:52Speaker 02

  Oil of lemon.

• 10:54Ira Glass?

  Not only do they match up, ingredient for ingredient, identical.

• 10:57Speaker 02

  Oil of coriander.

• 10:59Ira Glass?

  The recipe in the newspaper fills in things that the one in the Coke archive leaves blank. The recipe from Coke's archive just lists numbers next to each ingredient, but the newspaper says what the numbers stand for: ounces, and drops, and drams. The recipe that was found in Coke's archive is just labeled X. The newspaper one says clearly, "This recipe is Coca-Cola." I got into this wondering if it might be possible that this super-secret recipe had been hiding in plain sight, in an old newspaper clipping, for decades. But once I learned that it actually matched this recipe in Coke's own archives, written by the creator of Coke, it was hard not to get very excited. These last two weeks, I've been carrying around a printout of the recipe everywhere I go.

• 11:42Ira Glass?

  This one that I have right here with me in the studio today. And I've been telling everybody I see, "I think I may have found the secret formula for Coke." And then I just watch them freak out. So now, right here on the radio, I will read you the formula. You have heard the facts. You can draw your own conclusions as to what this is. That's after a quick break. Stay with us.

• 12:06Speaker 05

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• 12:26Speaker 01

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• 12:58Ira Glass?

  It's This American Life. Okay, so it's time to read you what I believe is the secret formula for Coca-Cola. But first, is it legal for us to even talk about this on the radio? Is Coke going to sue us both?

• 13:10Speaker 02

  No, I don't think they will. Because if they sued anything pertaining to the formula, then they would have to then produce the formula in order to say that what you were doing was an infringement on their formula. And they will never do that.

• 13:27Ira Glass?

  Great. Here we go. The 7X formula is just one element in these two recipes. It's made from 20 drops of orange oil, 30 of lemon oil, 10 of nutmeg oil, 5 of coriander oil, 10 of neroli oil-- neroli is a kind of orangey flavor-- 10 of cinnamon oil, and 8 ounces of alcohol. You mix that together, and then you take a little bit of that flavoring. One recipe says 2 ounces, the other says 2 and 1/2. You put that into another container, where you're going to mix the syrup for the soda. The other ingredients: 3 ounces citric acid, 1 ounce caffeine, 2 and 1/2 gallons of water-- the recipe calls that "acqua," 2 pints of lime juice, 1 ounce of vanilla, 1 and 1/2 ounces of caramel coloring.

• 14:08Ira Glass?

  And then we arrive at the 2 most controversial ingredients in Coca-Cola: 30 pounds of sugar-- pounds. And at the very top of the page, first ingredient, FE Coca, which stands for Fluid Extract of Coca. That would be the flavor of the Coca leaf, which includes a small amount of cocaine. In fact, Mark says that cocaine figures in a big way in the creation of Coca-Cola. Before he invented Coke, John Pemberton had a hit with another drink called French Wine Coca. Its ingredients: wine, cocaine, and caffeine. Hard to see why people wouldn't for that one, right? Then, in 1885, Atlanta voted for prohibition. And Pemberton realized that he was going to have to get rid of the wine in his bestselling drink.

• 14:51Ira Glass?

  So he kept the 2 other ingredients, the cocaine and the caffeine. People love those. But when you mix cocaine and caffeine together, they're bitter. So he pours in a ton of sugar to cut the bitterness. And voila, Coca-Cola. Pemberton called it his temperance drink.

• 15:06Speaker 02

  I mean, this is an interesting thing. They still do use Coca leaf for Coke, but they decocaineize it in Maywood, New Jersey, at the Stepon Chemical Company, which is--

• 15:17Ira Glass?

  Wait, wait. So there's a plant in New Jersey, and basically they import tons and tons of Coca leaves? They remove the cocaine from the Coca leaf?

• 15:27Speaker 02

  Correct. And it's been decocaineized there since 1903.

• 15:31Ira Glass?

  1903 being the year that Coca-Cola rids itself of cocaine. So there's all this circumstantial evidence pointing to this recipe being the original recipe for Coca-Cola, or at any rate, one of the original recipes. But the only way to tell for sure would be to make a batch. Taste it. The historian had never done that. The columnist back in 1979 never did it. That would be the final test. So we set out to do it. This is it. This is it at the top, the first one up there. First obstacle in our path, kind of a huge one. Coca leaves are a Schedule II controlled substance, totally illegal in the United States. When we asked the company that brings them in under special federal supervision and decocaineizes them for Coca-Cola, this company, Stepon, and asked them to sell us some, they

• 16:16Ira Glass?

  stopped returning our calls. No Coca leaves, no way to make the secret recipe. But then, my fellow This American Life producer Ben Calhoun turned to an obscure back alley resource called the internet. Wow, look at this. I just typed Coca tea into the search. 5, 6, 7. There's like a dozen things, more than a dozen. 15, 20 things come up, which are Coca tea just in amazon.com. Right. So the way that Coke does it, with taking the cocaine out, this company says that they do the same thing. So the hardest part was done, except for making the soda. For that, we turned to professionals.

• 16:58Ira Glass?

  When we first sent you guys this recipe and you took a look at it, can I just ask you, what did you think when you saw the ingredients? It was pretty dizzying for me. Yeah, I mean, it took a little while to sort of translate the handwriting and figure out what it was. With Eric Chastain and Mike Spear, respectively the VP of Operations and the Marketing Director at Jones Soda in Seattle. Jones makes its living on flavors like cream soda and green apple soda. But they're also known for being willing to try anything. They have made turkey and gravy soda, they've made Brussels sprout soda. We sent them our recipe. And by the time that Ben and I got to their office, Mike and Eric had already made up a couple bottles of our recipe, and were ready for a taste test. Our stuff versus real Coca-Cola.

• 17:41Speaker 06

  It's the first bottle of Coke we've ever had in this office. Get it out as soon as we can. Just get rid of it.

• 17:48Ira Glass?

  We were worried that asking you guys to go out and make Coca-Cola was like asking you to go into the Death Star and blow up some planets or something.

• 17:55Speaker 06

  Well, there was a little debate over that.

• 17:56Ira Glass?

  There was a debate, yeah, for sure. First, samples from our soda, the one from the 1979 newspaper, are poured into little cups. We're instructed to sniff first, then take a small sip, roll it around in our mouths. We really do not know what to expect. Oh, thanks. I have this feeling like I'm going to drop acid right now.

• 18:31Speaker 03

  It's kind of tasty.

• 18:32Speaker 05

  It's kind of tasty. It's not bad. It's definitely got medicinal note to it.

• 18:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, it does.

• 18:39Ira Glass?

  I find it to be really mediciny. And if you didn't tell me that this was the Coca-Cola recipe, I wouldn't have known. It tastes fruity.

• 18:49Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 18:51Speaker 07

  It does taste a little fruity.

• 18:52Ira Glass?

  Ben says the flavor is like Fruit Loops. To me, it's more like orange-flavored baby aspirin, which means we failed, right? We made the recipe. You would never mistake it for Coca-Cola. But then it occurred to us, maybe the original version of Coca-Cola did not taste like Coke today. Charles Kandler, that guy who was taken into the Holy of Holies to learn the secret recipe from his dad, wrote this: "The Pemberton product," that is, the original product, "did not have an altogether agreeable taste. It was unstable. It contained too many things, too much of some ingredients and too little of others. The bouquet of several of the volatile essential oils previously used was adversely affected by some ingredients." That, that could be the lime and baby aspirin-flavored mess that

• 19:36Ira Glass?

  we had just tried. But there was another possibility. The soda guys thought that technology has gotten so much better at extracting flavors like orange oil and lemon oil from fruits in the last 125 years. It's possible that all our ingredients are much, much stronger than Pemberton worked with back in 1886.

• 19:55Speaker 06

  David Ames. David, it's Eric and the rest of the gang at Jones.

• 19:59Ira Glass?

  So Eric and Mike called the flavor company that they're working on with all this. It's a company that specializes in beverage flavors called Sovereign down in Orange County, California, and asked if they could do a version that tones down the citrus and other flavors.

• 20:11Speaker 06

  Maybe reduce some, I don't know, maybe 5%, 10%? OK, got it.

• 20:19Speaker 07

  Chemicals are all over here.

• 20:21Ira Glass?

  A few hours later, we have flown south to Los Angeles. We are in Sovereign's lab, a room that smells like you're inside of a bag of jelly beans. And we do a second taste test.

• 20:31Speaker 05

  All right, so we've got the revised cola on the left and then Coca-Cola on the right.

• 20:37Ira Glass?

  In the lab with us and Mike from Jones Soda were David Ames, who runs the flavor company, and his staff. Going with the idea that our essential oils were much stronger than Pemberton's, they ended up cutting the amount of flavor in half. And then they tried it and they thought, oh, let's cut it in half again. Hmm. It's interesting. It's definitely more mellow.

• 20:56Speaker 05

  But also, the flavor profile is almost at the same intensity as the Coke flavor profile.

• 21:03Ira Glass?

  I feel like you guys just knocked off Fort Knox.

• 21:08Ira Glass?

  We all look at each other like, what had we done? How close do you think you are to the taste of actual Coca-Cola now?

• 21:15Speaker 06

  You know, I would say probably, what, in a scale of 10? We're probably around 9, I would say. 8 and 1/2, 9.

• 21:23Ira Glass?

  Later, I talked to Steve Warth, the guy who did the heavy lifting and converting that old formula into modern lab measurements. He's the one in charge of developing Sovereign's flavors. He says the ingredients in this old recipe were no surprise to him. Most of them are the same ingredients you use to make any cola.

• 21:38Speaker 05

  Orange oil, lemon oil, nutmeg, and cinnamon would be the main ones. I noticed that the neroli and the coriander seemed higher than what I've seen elsewhere.

• 21:51Ira Glass?

  Steve says that if we ever decided to match Coca-Cola, the way it tastes today, lots of things about the formula are widely known. We'd have to replace the citric acid in the old formula with phosphoric acid, that's what modern sodas use. We'd replace the lime juice with lime oil. We'd swap this sugar for high-fructose corn syrup.

• 22:08Speaker 05

  I know that in some of the other flavor companies that I've worked at, we've worked on trying to get as close. We've had customers that come in and say, I want an exact match for Coke. And they're usually pretty close.

• 22:19Ira Glass?

  So basically, this idea of Coke, it's this super-secret thing that nobody could crack, that, from your perspective, that's just some very cheerful showmanship on their part.

• 22:29Speaker 05

  Well, actually, no. It isn't. If you want to go side by side and match it exactly, that's very difficult. And that's not only difficult for Coca-Cola, it's difficult for everything.

• 22:44Ira Glass?

  That's because even if you know that there's, say, cinnamon in a drink, you don't know where it came from. Sri Lanka, Indonesia. And that can make all the difference in the flavor. I asked the flavor guys at Sovereign if they could pick out the real Coca-Cola from our formula in a blind taste test.

• 22:59Speaker 05

  I'd be able to tell.

• 23:01Speaker 06

  Yeah, there's probably a good chance that we will, yes.

• 23:03Ira Glass?

  So we marked the little plastic cups, which had real Coca-Cola with a sharpie, just a little dot on the bottom of the cup. The cups with our formula had no dot. Everyone tasted. David, the guy who runs the company, was sure that he was drinking our formula. And then he flipped over the cup and saw--

• 23:18Speaker 05

  Sharpie.

• 23:19Speaker 07

  I got a sharpie.

• 23:21Ira Glass?

  Meaning, he thought our formula was Coca-Cola.

• 23:23Speaker 07

  I got a sharpie.

• 23:28Ira Glass?

  Do you think ordinary consumers would be able to pick out which one of these is real Coca-Cola?

• 23:34Speaker 06

  You know, I highly doubt it. I seriously doubt it. I think if we would do a blind test right now with a regular consumer, I think we will be able to fool them.

• 23:45Speaker 06

  Attention all beverage shoppers. Take moments to look down at your shopping cart. You may have the wrong card. If you have the wrong card, please return to the parking pocket. Thank you.

• 23:56Ira Glass?

  Ben and I put on lab coats and we set up a table in aisle 2B of a supermarket one afternoon with bottles of our soda, that is, the formula from the 1979 newspaper article, and Coca-Cola. Taste test time. One of the first people who came up to us was actually a woman who had worked supermarket tastings herself.

• 24:14Speaker 07

  Use your smiles. People love to see a smile. And when you get a smile back, that's when you're like, hey, you want to try a sample?

• 24:21Ira Glass?

  Do I have to make the--

• 24:23Speaker 07

  No, you don't have to. That's what I do sometimes.

• 24:26Ira Glass?

  So Ben and I smiled. With each person, we would give them our formula first.

• 24:30Speaker 05

  I taste berries.

• 24:32Ira Glass?

  And then we gave real Coke second.

• 24:34Speaker 05

  Tastes like RC Cola.

• 24:36Ira Glass?

  Tastes like RC--

• 24:37Speaker 05

  Tastes like a really cheap cola.

• 24:39Ira Glass?

  And before we told people what they were, we asked which they liked better.

• 24:42Speaker 07

  I like the first one better.

• 24:44Ira Glass?

  Probably the second one. Second one? Yeah, the second one I prefer. 60% of the people preferred our formula over Coca-Cola.

• 24:51Speaker 05

  The first one.

• 24:52Ira Glass?

  Though, to be fair to Coca-Cola, the people who said that they drank a lot of soft drinks, they always preferred the Coke. It's better than the first one. And when we asked people to guess which of the two drinks was Coca-Cola, to our surprise, actually, of the 30 people that we polled, 28 could tell which was Coca-Cola. Our formula was that different. People saw a family resemblance, though.

• 25:12Speaker 07

  I was thinking it tastes more like the old vanilla Coke.

• 25:15Speaker 05

  It had an aftertaste. It made me stop and think for a minute. But I can tell it was somewhere in there, or it was manufactured by Coke.

• 25:22Speaker 04

  Tastes like weird soda trying to be Coke.

• 25:27Ira Glass?

  There was just one more person that had wanted to taste the soda that we made and look at the recipe. And that was the Coca-Cola Corporation's resident expert on the history of the product and its early formulas.

• 25:38Speaker 05

  My name is Phil Mooney. I'm the archivist for the Coca-Cola Company, based in Atlanta, Georgia. My quick reaction is that it's sweeter and flatter than Coca-Cola. It doesn't have the, what we call the bite and the burn that Coca-Cola has.

• 25:59Ira Glass?

  Does this seem like it could be an ancestor or a relative of Coca-Cola?

• 26:04Speaker 05

  You know, quite frankly, I don't think so.

• 26:07Ira Glass?

  I told Phil everything that we knew about the recipe, the newspaper article it came from, how it matched a recipe deep in his own archives. He was not impressed. Very, very not impressed.

• 26:18Speaker 05

  And really, this is not unusual. I can't tell you how many people have come forward over the years and claimed to have the formula for Coca-Cola. I probably have three or four dozen examples of that. And they'll say, well, you know, I knew this old pharmacist, I mean, almost the same story that you told me. And he got this recipe from a friend of, usually it's a friend of, Asa Kandler or John Pemberton.

• 26:48Ira Glass?

  And do most of them have these same ingredients? They have lime, and they have neroli, and cinnamon, and nutmeg, and--

• 26:55Speaker 05

  Almost all of them are very, very similar, if not identical.

• 27:01Ira Glass?

  We went around and around on this. To me, the fact that the recipe showed up over and over gave it credibility. Coke's inventor, John Pemberton, was known to have sold the recipe to several different people back in the early days. And the fact that it had appeared in his own notebook in Coke's archive seemed like the clincher. But Phil said that none of that notebook, if we were to look at it more closely, was full of all kinds of failed attempts at soda recipes and variations on recipes. So it was hard for him to believe that the real formula for Coke was stuck in there among that stuff.

• 27:30Speaker 05

  Could it be a precursor? Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Is this the one that went to market? I don't think so.

• 27:38Ira Glass?

  But we don't know.

• 27:40Speaker 05

  We're pretty sure. We're pretty sure that--

• 27:45Speaker 05

  The final recipe was not the one represented in that book.

• 27:49Ira Glass?

  I asked him if anybody at Coca-Cola who had access to the original recipe, which he says they still have, actually checked to see if it matched the one in that notebook. And he politely sidestepped that question, and we moved on. It is all this fuss about the secret formula, but it seems like the basic ingredients of Coca-Cola are actually on the public record.

• 28:09Speaker 05

  Absolutely.

• 28:10Ira Glass?

  So I put it to him, was the secret formula really a secret? He said that even if somebody cracked the entire manufacturing process, which he said they'd have to do, and produced something very, very close, Coke has this whole other thing nobody can touch.

• 28:25Speaker 05

  There's a psychological element to this product. We've got 125 years' worth of marketing and advertising and people's memories.

• 28:36Ira Glass?

  Well, in the supermarket, when we were in the supermarket, one of the young women who tasted the product, she tasted an unmarked little cup of Coca-Cola, and she said, that tastes like my childhood.

• 28:45Speaker 05

  Yeah, there you go. Yeah.

• 28:47Ira Glass?

  That's what 125 years of omnipresent worldwide distribution and promotion buys you. I told Phil that we were going to put up the old recipe that we found on our website, and I asked him if it would be OK with Coke if listeners would try to make batches themselves. All the ingredients and oils that you need are online, they're cheap, too. And he laughed and said, yeah, yeah, let them try. They'll come running back to Coke.

• 29:17Ira Glass?

  Coming up, how much does one of President Obama's old spark plugs sell for? And the search for other historical originals in a minute. From Chicago Public Radio, when our program continues.

• 29:29Speaker 05

  Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors. This message comes from Capital One. Capital One offers checking accounts with no fees or minimums. What's in your wallet? Terms apply. See capitalone.com/bankguide for details. Capital One, N.A., member FDIC.

• 29:49Speaker 01

  Support for This American Life comes from Squarespace. Squarespace gives you everything you need to offer services and get paid, all in one place. From consultations to events and experiences, showcase your offerings with a customizable website designed to attract clients and grow your business. Plus, connect with your audience and raise support for your cause by fundraising directly on your website with built-in donation tools. Visit squarespace.com/american to get 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain.

• 30:19Ira Glass?

  Support for This American Life comes from AT&T. Right now at AT&T, you can get the new iPhone 18 Pro for $0.00 with eligible trade-in. It has the ultimate Pro camera system and a big leap in battery life, so you can turn this deal into a long-lasting connection. Connecting changes everything. Requires trade-in of $230 or more and eligible plan. Terms and restrictions apply, subject to change. Visit an AT&T store for details.

• 30:48Ira Glass?

  It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Today's show, Original Recipe, stories of people going to great lengths to find the authentic, original item. Today's show is a rerun. We have arrived at Act Two of our show. Act Two, Ask Not What Your Handwriting Analyst Can Do For You, Ask What You Can Do For Your Handwriting Analyst. When you find an old, authentic, original, it can, of course, mean lots and lots of money. Jake Halpern tells what happened when somebody stumbled onto a trove of astounding papers, which lots of people thought was worth millions.

• 31:17Speaker 03

  John Reznikoff buys and sells relics and documents. He's got a sprawling office in Westport, Connecticut, that's floor-to-ceiling history, old documents hanging everywhere, signed by Thomas Jefferson, or James Madison, or John Hancock. He's got Abraham Lincoln's spectacles in a file cabinet, and in the middle of the room, as if some movers just dumped it there, something that looks like an old school desk. That's Abraham Lincoln's desk.

• 31:42Speaker 03

  And why is it sitting here? Good question. I need to get it restored. By the way, $325,000 if you're interested. In a back room, there's Annie Oakley's gun leaning up against the shelf, where Ernest Hemingway's typewriter sits, alongside Franklin Roosevelt's chess set. It's like what you'd see if the Smithsonian had a going-out-of-business sale. The strangest thing that he bought and sold recently was President Obama's old Jeep. It helped that Obama had mentioned the car in a speech at Chrysler. And I put a little clip of that on a YouTube video. I'll do my best Obama impersonation. My first car was a Jeep Grand Cherokee. I loved that car. It sold for a lot, though John wouldn't say how much. When the guy who bought it had it repaired, John asked if he could keep the spare parts.

• 32:27Speaker 03

  He stores them in a closet in his office.

• 32:32Speaker 03

  So I guess, I'm not kidding, right? So I guess these are struts. Yeah. Those are Obama's struts.

• 32:40Speaker 03

  And

• 32:45Speaker 03

  in the bottom here, I'll grab a spark plug. There. There's a spark plug from Obama's car. I actually just sold one of these for $500, because it was Obama's.

• 32:57Speaker 03

  Sucker, right? $500 for a spark plug? But five minutes in John's office, and you realize people will buy anything connected to historical figures, assuming it's real.

• 33:08Speaker 03

  This business, especially their rare document business, can be risky. There are so many fakes out there. So John is a fanatic about authenticity. He's studied fakes to see how they're made. He owns a huge collection of forgeries he bought from another collector, and he uses it as a reference. He can sometimes even identify a particular forger. And part of his office looks like a lab on CSI. He's got a special high-powered magnifier called a Proscope and a video spectral comparator, a $30,000 machine used to analyze ink. John's cult is an expert witness on handwriting in all kinds of court cases. He's a go-to guy in his field for spotting fake autographs. At the risk of sounding egotistical, everybody in the business who wants an opinion

• 33:51Speaker 03

  on pretty much any presidential person, the first person they come to is me. And that's a, that's a big change in the 13 years.

• 34:06Speaker 03

  13 years ago, that's when John's career all but collapsed in a scandal so deep and far-reaching that people are still arguing about what exactly happened. Even John himself isn't entirely sure. He made mistakes he didn't know he could make, mistakes he didn't even suspect. And for years, he didn't talk about it, until now. It all started in 1992, when John got a call from a guy named Lawrence X. Cusack III. Very nice, very friendly guy, and he had some beautiful stamps that he was selling that were his father's, or his father's collection. And I remember it included some very nice, illustrated envelopes from the 19th century.

• 34:47Speaker 03

  And I would, I bought them in several batches and became very friendly with him. He seemed to be very educated, extremely well-polished, very well-dressed. The two of them hit it off. They started to hang out on the weekends. John was engaged at the time, and Cusack, everyone called him Lex, had a pretty young wife. They'd all have dinner at an Italian place. To John, Lex was a kind of worldly older brother. They started confiding in each other. In the beginning, he unraveled his military career, which I thought was the coolest thing I'd ever heard. John had a particular reverence for soldiers. His own dad had served in the Pacific in World War II, and John still talks about the time when he was eight, and his father took out his army uniform, covered in medals

• 35:31Speaker 03

  and ribbons, laid it out on the family's ping-pong table. Ever since, John had been sort of obsessed with the military. He'd never joined himself, but he was eager to listen to someone like Lex, who told him he'd been in the Navy, flying F-16s during Vietnam. Lex was quiet about it. John had to pry the details out of him, that he'd been downed in Cambodia and survived by hiding in a swamp, breathing through a reed. What really struck John, what blew him away, was when they visited the Naval Academy in Annapolis. Lex's sister-in-law had been admitted, so they went down for plebe weekend. You know, very proud group of friends and family.

• 36:09Speaker 03

  And when Lex came out, he was in a completely white uniform, lieutenant commander's uniform, because he was a lieutenant commander, wearing the hat, wearing the Navy cross, wearing all the medals on his chest. And there's, you know, 3,000 people there, and they're all saluting him. And he's giving back, if you can imagine my hand going to my head, a perfect salute. And I'm like, wow. I'm with a war hero here, right now, and this is my buddy.

• 36:47Speaker 03

  A few months after they met, Lex got to talking about his father, also named Lawrence Cusack, who died in 1985. Cusack Sr. had been a distinguished lawyer. He'd worked for the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York for many years, and he was personal counsel to John Cardinal O'Connor, the Archbishop. As Lex explained it, he had some pretty high-powered clients.

• 37:07Speaker 02

  At one point, Lex revealed to me that his dad had worked for the Kennedys. And anytime I meet somebody who has any connection with anybody famous, I'm like, where are the papers? The papers are valuable. Anything he signed would be valuable. And a conversation ensued on that, and he said he'd look.

• 37:26Speaker 03

  A month or so later, Lex mentioned something else interesting.

• 37:29Speaker 02

  Well, then Marilyn Monroe gets introduced into the equation. My father also worked for Marilyn Monroe. And he--

• 37:40Speaker 03

  Can you just describe how that goes down?

• 37:43Speaker 02

  Well, Marilyn Monroe had a New York residence, too. And he said he did some legal work for her and indicated that there was a relationship that his father helped to hush.

• 38:01Speaker 03

  When he tells you this, like, what's your reaction? That's pretty crazy news, right?

• 38:06Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, naturally-- and I think anybody would have this reaction-- the dollar signs are coming in my eyes. I'm thinking, oh, my God. This is-- you know, this is a career maker for me. This is the treasure that I've been searching for my whole life.

• 38:23Speaker 03

  And now are you starting to kind of tell him, like, can I see these papers?

• 38:29Speaker 02

  I'm pushing him. I'm saying, go, go look for them. Where are they? You know, go get them. You know, go through the files. You don't know what you might be sitting on. You might be sitting on fortunes. Maybe it's hundreds of thousands. Maybe it's millions.

• 38:45Speaker 03

  JFK and Marilyn Monroe. This was arguably the most storied love affair and cover-up of the 20th century. We've all heard the rumors about it for 50 years. But it's just that, rumors. No one ever had any hard and fast proof, until maybe now. He forced himself to be patient as Lex searched through his father's extensive and mysterious files. John can't quite remember how long he waited, maybe weeks or even months, until one day, Lex finally shows up at his office with a discovery in hand.

• 39:14Speaker 02

  He brought in a briefcase into the office. And I remember there was a document that I believe was on a sheet of stationery that was written in Kennedy's hand, and it sure looked like Kennedy to me. And it basically was written to Marilyn Monroe and indicated some kind of payoff. He agreed to pay something or give her something or set up a trust, I think it was.

• 39:45Speaker 03

  In other words, jackpot.

• 39:47Speaker 02

  Agreement made this third day of March 1960 between John F. Kennedy residing at the Carlyle Hotel, New York, New York, Marilyn Monroe residing at 444 East 57th Street, New York, New York. Witnesseth, where as a result of a relationship between Marilyn Monroe, herein referred to as MM, and John F. Kennedy, herein referred to as JFK, MM believes she has suffered irreparable harm to her well-being and to her professional life and career, and that such has been the cause of personal hardship and suffering, which is not possible to measure. MM shall never discuss nor reveal to any persons the specifics of the said relationship between her and JFK.

• 40:38Speaker 03

  And there were other documents like this one. Lex kept finding them, letters on Kennedy's US Senate stationery, on White House stationery. There were index cards and personal notes. The documents proved JFK's relationship, not just with Marilyn Monroe, but with other sketchier characters as well.

• 40:54Speaker 02

  This is a memorandum. And I'll read a little-- shall I read some of it?

• 41:01Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 41:02Speaker 02

  Monroe will refrain from discussing her knowledge of any meetings or discussions of any kind which may have taken place at which were present JFK and Gene Connor.

• 41:14Speaker 03

  Who's Gene Connor?

• 41:15Speaker 02

  Sam Giancana.

• 41:17Speaker 03

  The mob boss?

• 41:17Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 41:19Speaker 03

  I mean, are you nervous holding these things in your hand for the first time when you're doing it?

• 41:24Speaker 02

  I'm nervous on a number of levels. I was scared. I'm thinking that, you know, this is really dangerous stuff. How do I handle this? Is this too big for me? How am I going to do this? How am I going to do it right? And also, what's going through my head is, oh, my God, here it is, the Holy Grail. Oh, my God, this is worth a lot of money.

• 41:52Speaker 03

  In all, Lex unearthed more than 300 documents, a whole archive. And John, of course, considered that maybe, like the Holy Grail, it was too good to be true. So he set about authenticating the papers. He went to at least half a dozen experts in the field, not just handwriting experts, but people who specialize in Kennedy documents. But John didn't want the contents of the papers to get out. He wanted to protect their value. So he sent the experts only a few documents each, or sometimes portions of documents he'd Xeroxed, excluding the juicy parts.

• 42:22Speaker 02

  And each one, one by one, authenticated them and said they were real.

• 42:27Speaker 03

  One of these experts was John's mentor and a giant in the field, Charles Hamilton.

• 42:32Speaker 02

  And right away, he looked at it. And this is-- if you look at that book right there where it says "The Robot", okay, that's all about John Kennedy's handwriting. So here's the guy that wrote the book. And he looked at it, maybe spent 10 minutes with it. This is authentic. And wrote a letter on it. And that gave me tremendous confidence. It's an important moment for me. It's everyday business for him because he doesn't know, really, what this signifies.

• 43:05Speaker 03

  He has no idea, then, that he's signing off on the fact that JFK gave hush money to Marilyn Monroe, that there was ties to the mob, that the amphetamines, all these crazy parts. He has just, kind of, in effect, put his stamp of approval that this is a bona fide chapter in American history.

• 43:24Speaker 02

  His imprimatur on it meant that everything-- because everything was from the same archive and existed from the same barrel of apples-- was authentic.

• 43:35Speaker 03

  John, isn't it possible that if you had come to him and said, "Look, the stuff that I'm giving you here is red hot. This confirms some stuff that people don't want to believe, and some of it is kind of incredible", that he might have said, "All right, let me break out the magnifying glass and take a little bit of a closer look here. This is huge, what I'm about to do."

• 43:58Speaker 02

  You know, that I won't concede because I think the way in knowing how a handwriting expert looks at things, either it is or it isn't. So either it was his handwriting or it wasn't. What it said wasn't important.

• 44:17Speaker 03

  So the papers were authenticated, and John laid the groundwork to sell them. He enlisted another dealer of historical papers and artifacts, a well-connected guy named Tom Cloud, to handle the actual sales. Lex would get most of the money. Tom and John would make up to 20%, which they would split evenly. They came up with a strategy. They quietly sell the documents to Tom Cloud's roster of wealthy clients on the condition that they not disclose what they'd bought to anyone for a few years. Meanwhile, John and Tom would find someone to write a book about the archive, which would then lead to a movie deal. Once the book and movie were released, of course, the value of the documents would likely skyrocket, and investors would be happy. Everything started to fall into place. An acquaintance connected them with the perfect writer

• 45:02Speaker 03

  to publicize Lex's archive, Seymour Hersh, the famous investigative journalist who'd won a Pulitzer for breaking the My Lai massacre story. Hersh, as it turns out, was already under contract to write a book about JFK's presidency called "The Dark Side of Camelot". Cusack began sending copies of the documents in batches. And Hersh started checking that the names and other details in the documents were consistent with his own research.

• 45:26Speaker 02

  All of a sudden, a document would come out, and Hersh would independently verify that there was a name of a doctor that injected Kennedy with painkillers for his back and that nobody knew this. And he found out the name of the doctor through somebody who he had interviewed. And it would be impossible-- For Lex to have produced that name, or these names like, or the people who were cosigning the documents, or advisors to Marilyn Monroe, that were being verified along the way. There was more confidence. The confidence was building.

• 46:02Speaker 03

  And this was something they could use to build investor confidence, too. Pulitzer Prize winning author Seymour Hersh is on board, and has independently verified key parts of the archive. Hersh's book would come out in November of 1997. In addition, Hersh was working on a documentary about the archive in collaboration with ABC. By the end of the summer of 1997, about 140 different investors had made purchases from Tom Cloud. The trust agreement between Kennedy and Monroe had a loan sold for $450,000. At this point, the documents had already netted roughly $5 million. It was all going great. They were making a lot of money. John and his fiancee got married, Lex's wife

• 46:43Speaker 03

  was a bridesmaid, and John had a baby boy. Then, one day, John's in Cape Cod, and he gets a phone call.

• 46:51Speaker 02

  August 22nd, 1997, sitting on the beach.

• 46:58Speaker 03

  What happens then?

• 46:59Speaker 02

  That's, I believe that's the day. Now, I could have it wrong. It's either August 22nd or August 27th. And I'd like to know what that date is, so I could say that's the day that changed my life. That's the call I get from Cloud about Lex being sandbagged by Peter Jennings.

• 47:17Speaker 03

  Cloud is Tom Cloud, Lex and John's business partner. ABC's Peter Jennings had interviewed Lex for a segment that would air on 2020.

• 47:25Speaker 02

  Where did the collection come from? The answer lies with Mr. Lex Cusack. My first thought was-

• 47:31Speaker 03

  John and Lex had been excited about the segment. They saw it as a kind of phase one of their media launch.

• 47:36Speaker 02

  Were you aware at any time before your father died that he'd done any work for the Kennedy family? No.

• 47:42Speaker 03

  What became clear very quickly was this wasn't just a puff piece hyping Hersh's book. It was an investigation. You might have heard something about it. It became huge news. What happened was that ABC had gotten wind of some suspicious inconsistencies in the archive. For starters, one of the letters from Cusack Senior, which was dated 1961, had a zip code in the letterhead. Turns out, there were no zip codes in 1961. They weren't announced until 1962. So ABC hired an expert of its own, a former document examiner for the FBI. He did forensic analysis of the documents, scrutinizing the paper, the ink, the type. The examiner found that the typeface turned out to be something called Prestige Pica Selectric, which didn't exist until the early 1970s. And whoever typed

• 48:27Speaker 03

  these documents had also made corrections using a particular kind of lift-off correction tape.

• 48:32Speaker 06

  And lift-off tape was not invented or placed onto the market until 1973, a full 10 years after President Kennedy was killed.

• 48:41Speaker 02

  So this is a blatant forgery by any standard?

• 48:45Speaker 06

  Blatant forgery.

• 48:46Speaker 03

  Jennings takes all this evidence and calmly and methodically presents it to Lex. Lex appears stunned, almost as if he can't process what Jennings is saying.

• 48:55Speaker 02

  How do you explain that? I really don't know. I don't know. I mean, this is a problem we grapple with often, is that are these the original documents? Are these copies that were made of the documents? Are these...

• 49:10Speaker 02

  Throughout the remainder of our interview, Mr. Cusack offered various explanations for the problems we showed him. But the one that he repeated most often was that the documents we had questioned might be later copies of originals. What he meant by this was never clear. So, somebody might have put their signatures on those documents at a later time? I'm not talking about the signatures. I'm not talking about the handwriting. The documents themselves. I understand what you're saying. I'm talking about the typewriter technology. It was not available at the time these documents were allegedly drawn. There must be an explanation of why those documents exist, if in fact they were produced later. Mr. Cusack, somebody has forged these documents. It's, I think, quite a lot of, the other experts will not agree.

• 49:54Speaker 02

  I'm bound to ask you, Mr. Cusack. Did you forge these documents? No, sir, I didn't. No.

• 50:01Speaker 03

  By this time in the interview, there's a pregnant bead of sweat sliding its way down Lex's cheek. He looks desperate and trapped. If the camera panned out, you'd half expect to see him manacle to the chair. So this is what Tom Cloud tells John when he calls him on that day in August.

• 50:17Speaker 02

  My heart dropped out of its spot in my body at that point, and it was, oh, no.

• 50:24Speaker 03

  Here's the interesting thing. It's not, oh, no, the papers are fake, or, oh, no, I've been duped by Lex. It's, oh, no, we've told the truth. And now we're in for it because we've antagonized the Kennedys, the one family in America you do not antagonize. Plus, the mob and god knows who else.

• 50:41Speaker 02

  This must be this very powerful family trying to prevent this information from coming out, and that there's no way that these are fake, that these are real, that, you know, Lex is a war hero. He's an honest and good man, and this can't be, and this is a big conspiracy, and we need to get to the bottom of it.

• 51:04Speaker 03

  The notion of a conspiracy might sound a bit far-fetched and frightening, but it also offered some assurances. At least in this scenario, the world as John knew it remained constant. The papers were still real, the choices he'd made were the right ones, and Lex Cusack was still his dear and trusted friend.

• 51:20Speaker 02

  That's what I'm thinking. And, you know, what seems like minutes afterwards, it's a grand jury investigation.

• 51:31Speaker 03

  John hired a criminal defense lawyer, and the two of them made a trip down to the US District Attorney's Office in Manhattan. They met with the prosecutor, Paul Engelmeyer. And even here, John didn't feel safe.

• 51:42Speaker 02

  We went in, we went in for the proffer session. I told my side of the story. I remember walking into Engelmeyer's office, and on his wall was a picture of Kennedy on the beach in Hyannis. And that, just in my mind, was, oh, my god. This is a setup. I'm going down because I've revealed the biggest secret of the last 40 years, and they don't want this secret to come out. So somehow, they're going to make it look like I'm a bad guy. He's working for them. You know, this is all a conspiracy, and all these bells are going off in my head.

• 52:24Speaker 03

  During this period, things got pretty dark for John. He began taking medication to reduce his anxiety and to prevent panic attacks. Still, he was paranoid. He became convinced that something terrible would happen to him, that his car would blow up when he turned the key.

• 52:38Speaker 02

  I'm thinking that there, somebody's going to kill me, basically. That's what's going to happen, that this stuff was not supposed to be released, and the one where they, there's going to be an accident.

• 52:51Speaker 03

  And all this time, John is rehashing the Peter Jennings interview and the inconsistencies with the documents. The typeface and the zip code, the lift-off correction tape. What explained all that? First chance he got, he confronted Lex.

• 53:04Speaker 02

  We met somewhere. I don't remember where, and he was holding his hands in his head. He didn't know what to do. He'll just give all the money back. Of course, he had spent most of the money then. You know, who did, where did these come from if they're not real? How could they be? "I did it," he said. You know, "I did it." It just got carried away.

• 53:26Speaker 03

  He's confessing to you, "I forged these documents."

• 53:31Speaker 02

  He didn't say exactly that. He said, "I did it. I'm the one who did it." And I said, "What are you talking about? How could this be? How could this possibly be? What are you telling me?" And even, and then he recanted. He said, "No, you know, I just said that because it was a moment. I didn't really do it. I don't know what this could be. Maybe it's a conspiracy. Maybe..." I don't know what he was saying. I don't remember, but he was equivocating.

• 53:54Speaker 03

  What especially bothered John was something else completely. During the 2020 segment, Peter Jennings had reported that ABC could find no evidence that Lex was a retired naval officer.

• 54:04Speaker 02

  I mean, that was a big thing for me, the military thing, you know? If he was this military hero, these can't, you know, in my mind, these can't possibly be non-authentic.

• 54:14Speaker 03

  When you confront him with this, what does he say?

• 54:18Speaker 02

  On one hand, he says, "Well, it was just kind of a story that got carried away." On the other hand, he said, "Well, there are things that I can't talk about." Like, the indication to me was, okay, he was, you know, MI5, or that it really was real, but he was like some kind of covert agent, and he couldn't talk about it. It seemed believable.

• 54:37Speaker 03

  Before you scream to yourself, "How could he be so stupid?" Consider that John's realization about Lex meant dismantling everything he understood about himself. John's entire career was based on knowing the real thing when he saw it. He could judge the authenticity of stamps and signatures and documents, and most importantly, people, especially friends. In other words, John was no dupe. No way. And not only was there a lot of money on the table, these documents were going to make his career. So while it might sound crazy that he believed that Lex was MI5, it made even less sense that John himself was a sucker.

• 55:11Speaker 02

  I would hang on anything that would be a thread that would be, yes, see, I was right. Here's the record of him being, you know, a covert agent for the CIA in military clothing, or whatever would happen that would make this whole thing, the whole nightmare, end.

• 55:35Speaker 03

  John's lawyer told him that he had to clear his name, and the only way to do that was to secretly record Lex. He needed to get him on tape discussing their earlier conversation, or Lex confessed and then recanted, because that would show the prosecutor that John was innocent. After all, Lex wouldn't be confessing and making excuses if John were in on the scam. John at first refused, arguing that Lex hadn't done anything wrong. His lawyer insisted.

• 56:00Speaker 02

  And he said, "Well, you don't have to do it if you don't want to. But tomorrow, if you don't do it, it's fine, but you need to get a new lawyer."

• 56:10Speaker 06

  I can't help but think that you've known something. Can't help it. I'm sorry.

• 56:15Speaker 03

  So John did it. His lawyer hired a private detective to wire John's office with a hidden microphone. He and Lex talked for an hour. They're both tense and emotional. Lex leaps from topic to topic, offering one wild, half-baked explanation after another, while John tries to pin him down.

• 56:31Speaker 06

  The thing that I can't get out of my mind, what's bothering me that I can't get out of my mind is when you came here, what was it, three days after this? Yeah. Okay, but you're sitting here. I know. Okay, you're sitting there and you're telling me that you're guilty, that you did everything, that everything's fake. You gotta listen. I'm listening, too. I am. I'm listening, too. I'm telling you, I'm looking at my son's picture. I know. John, I know. I'm looking at your son's picture. I'm looking at you. Okay, but you're-- You know, I mean, you don't realize how close I feel to you. So I'm looking at you, and I'm going, "Oh, my God. I've ruined this guy's life." Okay? Well, that's true. Okay, so I'm going, "Oh, my God."

• 57:10Speaker 03

  Lex tells John he only confessed in order to protect his father's reputation. He didn't want anyone thinking his father had forged the documents or that his father was somehow connected to the mob. Though, maybe his father did fake some papers for whatever reason.

• 57:24Speaker 06

  And when I was sitting there, I'm thinking, like, people are gonna think my father's a mob lawyer. My brother's gonna think he was like a mob lawyer, and that he forged the stuff to protect himself from getting in trouble. And now, it's sort of like, you know, I can't let that happen. So it's sort of like, what if people say, you know, "We'll give everything back, and the whole thing will go away. You know, we'll just pay everybody back. It was a big mistake. We don't know what caused it." That was like, I'm having a nervous breakdown practically. I couldn't figure out what the hell-- you know, it was such a shock. You know, what could, you know, possibly have happened? Could my dad have done this if he did do it? Why didn't he tell somebody or leave some kind of note or something?

• 58:00Speaker 03

  Lex seems genuinely confused. The only thing Lex essentially admits lying about is his Navy career. He tells John it was more or less a joke that got out of hand, until a number of people, including Lex's own wife, were under the impression that he actually fought in Vietnam. The thing barely hangs together. As for the crisp, white lieutenant commander's uniform that John had seen him wearing that day in Annapolis--

• 58:22Speaker 06

  Where's his uniform? Um, I just--

• 58:28Speaker 06

  Does it give you a military uniform? With your name on it? I don't have my name on it. I don't have my name on it. I never need to. And a note across.

• 58:37Speaker 03

  Lex didn't want to comment for this story, so all I have to go on from him is the TV footage and the wire recording. There, Lex mostly comes across as pathetic. He doesn't show any of the smooth cunning of the Hollywood con man. Instead, his genius, if that's what it is, is his lack of finesse. If he's conning John, then his disguise is the pitiable friend who got in over his head, and he plays it very, very well. So well that after the secretly-recorded meeting, John says he didn't feel relieved or justified. He felt awful.

• 59:09Speaker 02

  There was an Irish pub, like, on the street over from my office, and I remember drinking three Guinesses in like 10 minutes. And I'm not a drinker. I was like, "Wow, what did I just do?"

• 59:24Speaker 03

  Is there part of you still believing this guy could be a decorated Navy officer who has the real documents, and I'm betraying him?

• 59:36Speaker 02

  I think there's still, like-- I don't know why, but like, a 1/100 of 1% part of me that still thinks that.

• 59:55Speaker 03

  John says the real aha moment for him finally came when an FBI agent told him point-blank that Lex had never served in the military. In other words, Lex's best move, whether by luck or design, was that he hit John's Achilles' heel. He passed himself off as a decorated soldier. So Lex's deepest betrayal wasn't the JFK papers. It was claiming he breathed through a reed in Cambodia. Lex was convicted in federal court of mail and wire fraud and served nearly 10 years in prison. He got out about three years ago. Seymour Hersh's reputation took a temporary hit, especially after he testified at a trial that he quote-unquote "misstated things" regarding his independent verifications. John was cleared of any wrongdoing, but his life didn't just bounce right back.

• 1:00:40Speaker 03

  His business suffered. He had to resign as president at the Professional Autograph Dealers Association, an organization he founded. His marriage fell apart. The JFK papers nearly ruined him. And it's not surprising. He's had a hard time trusting people since.

• 1:00:55Speaker 02

  You know, I definitely have trust issues in my life. There's no question that I have trust issues because of this. I mean, you know, you get paranoid. Does-- is Lex my friend because I'm such a great guy? Or is it because I was a foil in his plot to take over the world? Or-- and then I'm thinking, you know, is this person really my friend? Who's really my-- who really is my friend, another person in my life? And I do do that, and I feel terrible and guilty about when I'm distrustful, and I shouldn't be. But it's there, and I have to temper that all the time.

• 1:01:39Speaker 03

  But in a weird way, he's thankful, too. His paranoia made him better at what he does. It was after the Cusack fiasco that he threw himself into studying fakes and forgeries and made himself so good at spotting them. When I showed John a copy of one of the Cusack documents, he started to analyze the handwriting all over again. It was a document from an archive that had fooled so many experts and that some people in the field, even to this day, argue is real. He turned the paper upside down, just as his mentor, Charles Hamilton, taught him to do. So you aren't distracted by the actual letters. You just see the lines, the curves, and the dots.

• 1:02:13Speaker 02

  Now, the Js were always different. But look at the Jack, for instance, upside down. And just look at the way-- the spacing and how it's inconsistent and bouncy. It's very, very good. The forgery is very, very good. I have no idea how they were made. No idea. That, to me, is the big mystery, you know, in my life. I don't know how he did it. I don't know how they were so good. I have no idea. Or if he did it. I don't even know that he did it. Maybe somebody else did it, and he pushed them forward.

• 1:02:48Speaker 03

  How hard is it to pull off-- how hard is it to pull off what Lex pulled off?

• 1:02:54Speaker 02

  I don't think anybody has ever done that in the history of our field as successfully as he did for the amount of time that he did.

• 1:03:05Speaker 03

  And how was he able to do that?

• 1:03:08Speaker 02

  Sheer genius, I'd say. Sheer genius.

• 1:03:15Speaker 03

  And perhaps Lex was a mastermind. But then again, we all want to think we can only be fooled by genius.

• 1:03:28Ira Glass?

  Jake Halpern. He's the host of the podcast Deep Cover, which does investigative stories about secrets and deceptions.

• 1:03:57Ira Glass?

  Special thanks today to Scott Morrie and the New York Botanical Garden, Emily Heimsoft, Matt Costello, Maggie Ward, Richie Valenti, and Margot Helgin, John Neese at Galco Soda Pop Stop. Production help on this rerun from Stone Nelson, Adrian Lilly, Catherine Ramondo, and Ruby Schwartz. Thanks also to our This American Life partners. These are people who subscribe to support the show and who listen ad-free. They get access to our live events. They get lots of bonus episodes, including a brand-new one this week. We're visiting some stories that are suddenly very relevant again because of things happening in the news. To join this party, go to thisamericanlife.org/lifepartners. The link is also in the show notes. This American Life is delivered to public radio stations by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange.

• 1:04:42Ira Glass?

  Thanks, as always, to our program's co-founder, Mr. Torey Malatia. You know, in the mailroom this week. I was surprised to catch him opening a love letter that he got from some random listener. This is not unusual. I can't tell you how many people have come forward over the years. I probably have three or four dozen examples of that. I'm Ari Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life.

• 1:05:18Speaker 05

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